People were, in fact, tortured. You can grieve for them if you wish.
If you grieve for everyone tortured in every branch not your own, not singling out your own branch for special treatment out of the literal infinity of branches, then I understand you have your work cut out for you just managing the mathematical infinities involved to specify a utility function. (The solutions I’ve seen all start by putting in the desired conclusion as an arbitrary assumption.)
No-one can or will mourn literally infinite people. (Even if you ignore people in other branches, what about people in our own in case our universe is spatially infinite and everything possible happens infinitely many times?) This is not how mourning works in humans.
You can mourn the general fact that suffering happens, without letting the (probably infinite) amounts of it directly establish the amount of mourning done. It wouldn’t be productive in any sense, because in a universe where everything happens somewhere—whether via quantum branches or sheer size or both—you can’t reduce the suffering, it’ll always be infinite. So mourning in this case does not serve any purpose; I would wish to stop feeling such mourning if I felt it.
Just rest assured that the other worlds exist somehow.
And that you cannot interact with them ever again and therefore should not mourn them.
And that you cannot interact with them ever again and therefore should not mourn them.
If people leave on a spaceship to colonize another galaxy, and between their speed and the expansion of the universe it is physically impossible to interact with them ever again, surely they still have moral weight. If the spaceship company had constructed the spaceship to collapse the moment they could no longer ever interact with us, to cut costs, then surely when we discovered this from their internal documents we would prosecute them as criminals, even though the consequences of their crime occurred somewhere as fundamentally separate from us as another world.
I don’t think you have, in your morality, an exception for everyone who is causally isolated from you.
You’re just stating your conclusion again. Such a moral belief is possible, but it’s a choice. I choose not to care morally about people I cannot even in principle interact with.
then surely when we discovered this from their internal documents we would prosecute them as criminals
Note that punishment for crime isn’t the same as grief, and works on different rules.
Why punish people? To reduce future similar crime. (I don’t accept moral propositions of punishment for punishment’s sake.) I could board such a ship in the future myself, and would not wish it to be sabotaged. So I want these saboteurs to be punished to deter future crime.
Here’s another reasoning for the same conclusion: their action reduced the (expected) utility of the people on the ship while they were still in contact with us. We just didn’t find out about it until later. This is analogous to a case where we discover that two years ago, Jane wounded Alex. We know that a year ago, Alex died from unrelated causes. We still want to punish Jane today even though Alex cannot be reimbursed himself anymore.
I don’t think you have, in your morality, an exception for everyone who is causally isolated from you.
My morality comes from two main sources. One is how I feel (due to nature and nurture): such as grief. Sometimes I find this is not how I want to feel, and then I try to change myself—as I would with any other feelings. So if I discovered myself grieving for people outside my universe, I would try to stop doing so.
Luckily I, like most people I think, don’t grieve for such people: grief falls off rapidly for more distant suffering (in space and/or time). People outside the future light cone, or in other quantum branches, are as far as they can be from me and still exist in some sense.
The second source of my morality is practical ethics: how do I want to behave, and want others to behave, to achieve certain things? Here too, grieving or expending any other resource (time, effort, thought) on people I cannot interact with doesn’t benefit me or them or anyone else, so I would prefer not to do it.
Can you clarify why you choose to grieve for people at all?
I mean, you seem to classify grieving as an example of expending resources on someone. So if person A dies and person B grieves, B is expending resources on someone. Who benefits from those resources? It certainly isn’t A; A is dead.
There seem to be a number of possibilities.
1) Nobody actually benefits from those resources being expended. In which case your reasoning seems to equally well reject all grief, not just grief over hypothetical superluminal travellers.
2) Some surviving person benefits from B’s grief… maybe B themselves, maybe A’s family members, maybe somebody else. In this case rejecting grieving for A may have costs, and perhaps those potential costs should be understood before rejecting it.
3) A benefited, while alive, from the fact that B runs algorithms that reliably result in B grieving for A once A is dead. In this case rejecting grieving for A may have the consequence of also rejecting those algorithms, which would perhaps otherwise have been beneficial to someone in the same way that were in the past beneficial to A. Here again, perhaps those potential costs should be understood before rejecting grief.
A combination of all three options is true; I don’t know of a fourth. Grief is mostly a waste because there’s more of it than I’d like (option 1), but also helps to prevent future causes of grief (option 3) and possibly helps the griever cope (option 2).
I see grief as analogous to pain. It’s an evolved response. Its primary function is conditioning by negative reinforcement. To avoid grief, people try to prevent grief-causing situations, e.g. protecting their loved ones more. Just as with pain, we have to live with grief today but we may wish to self-modify to grieve less.
Because it’s an evolved mechanism, it tends to be entangled with other processes; thus it is claimed to have a secondary purpose—to help with “healthy psychological coping” of the grieving person in accepting reality. I’ve heard this claim but have not looked into its sources and don’t have a good estimation of how true or important this is.
I suffer from experiencing grief a lot more than I am willing to suffer in order to get these benefits. If it was just a matter of choice, I would choose to grieve a lot less or maybe not at all, in all situations. That would require a level of modification of my psychology that would also enable me to get the above benefits without grieving. In reality I don’t have that level of control.
However, we do have some control over how much we grieve. In particular, grieving for very distant people seems to be off-by-default in most people, and only activated by deliberate thinking about those distant people; i.e. this kind of grief may be avoided a lot of the time. It also happens to be the kind of grief where the above benefits are least (or nonexistent). So of course I focus my efforts and advise others to practice grieving less first of all in such circumstances.
Note: “grief” can be read broadly, as in “feeling sad through empathy with suffering distant others”.
Given this, I am very confused by what you think is special about the esoteric possibilities you discuss with alex_zag_al above.
That is, given my understanding of your position, it seems you should reject or endorse grieving over those doomed intergalactic explorers to basically the same degree that you would either reject or endorse grieving over a boat full of tourists who drown on their way to Greece. (I’m not really sure what degree that is… what I get from your explanation is that you endorse some amount of grief, but not as much of it as people actually demonstrate.)
Does it matter at all that they’re in a spaceship etc. etc. etc.? Or does that just happen to be the example under discussion?
It matters that I’m not going to interact with them again (or with their dead bodies). For people who are still entangled with me, like tourists in Greece, I allow more grief because in principle my grief (and by TDT-like reasoning, the grief of others) may help prevent other drowning accidents in the future. But you’re right that the actual grief I experience in practice for tourists drowning in Greece is for practical purposes zero.
The example of a spaceship is esoteric; I wasn’t the one who chose it, but I responded to people discussing exotic propositions like grieving for “acausal” people like those in other quantum branches. I can’t even afford to grieve for everyone who suffers on this Earth, in my own branch − 150,000 people die daily and I haven’t got that much grief to spend even if I tried to grieve as much as possible (which I don’t want to).
If you grieve for everyone tortured in every branch not your own, not singling out your own branch for special treatment out of the literal infinity of branches, then I understand you have your work cut out for you just managing the mathematical infinities involved to specify a utility function. (The solutions I’ve seen all start by putting in the desired conclusion as an arbitrary assumption.)
No-one can or will mourn literally infinite people. (Even if you ignore people in other branches, what about people in our own in case our universe is spatially infinite and everything possible happens infinitely many times?) This is not how mourning works in humans.
You can mourn the general fact that suffering happens, without letting the (probably infinite) amounts of it directly establish the amount of mourning done. It wouldn’t be productive in any sense, because in a universe where everything happens somewhere—whether via quantum branches or sheer size or both—you can’t reduce the suffering, it’ll always be infinite. So mourning in this case does not serve any purpose; I would wish to stop feeling such mourning if I felt it.
And that you cannot interact with them ever again and therefore should not mourn them.
If people leave on a spaceship to colonize another galaxy, and between their speed and the expansion of the universe it is physically impossible to interact with them ever again, surely they still have moral weight. If the spaceship company had constructed the spaceship to collapse the moment they could no longer ever interact with us, to cut costs, then surely when we discovered this from their internal documents we would prosecute them as criminals, even though the consequences of their crime occurred somewhere as fundamentally separate from us as another world.
I don’t think you have, in your morality, an exception for everyone who is causally isolated from you.
You’re just stating your conclusion again. Such a moral belief is possible, but it’s a choice. I choose not to care morally about people I cannot even in principle interact with.
Note that punishment for crime isn’t the same as grief, and works on different rules.
Why punish people? To reduce future similar crime. (I don’t accept moral propositions of punishment for punishment’s sake.) I could board such a ship in the future myself, and would not wish it to be sabotaged. So I want these saboteurs to be punished to deter future crime.
Here’s another reasoning for the same conclusion: their action reduced the (expected) utility of the people on the ship while they were still in contact with us. We just didn’t find out about it until later. This is analogous to a case where we discover that two years ago, Jane wounded Alex. We know that a year ago, Alex died from unrelated causes. We still want to punish Jane today even though Alex cannot be reimbursed himself anymore.
My morality comes from two main sources. One is how I feel (due to nature and nurture): such as grief. Sometimes I find this is not how I want to feel, and then I try to change myself—as I would with any other feelings. So if I discovered myself grieving for people outside my universe, I would try to stop doing so.
Luckily I, like most people I think, don’t grieve for such people: grief falls off rapidly for more distant suffering (in space and/or time). People outside the future light cone, or in other quantum branches, are as far as they can be from me and still exist in some sense.
The second source of my morality is practical ethics: how do I want to behave, and want others to behave, to achieve certain things? Here too, grieving or expending any other resource (time, effort, thought) on people I cannot interact with doesn’t benefit me or them or anyone else, so I would prefer not to do it.
Can you clarify why you choose to grieve for people at all?
I mean, you seem to classify grieving as an example of expending resources on someone. So if person A dies and person B grieves, B is expending resources on someone. Who benefits from those resources? It certainly isn’t A; A is dead.
There seem to be a number of possibilities.
1) Nobody actually benefits from those resources being expended. In which case your reasoning seems to equally well reject all grief, not just grief over hypothetical superluminal travellers.
2) Some surviving person benefits from B’s grief… maybe B themselves, maybe A’s family members, maybe somebody else. In this case rejecting grieving for A may have costs, and perhaps those potential costs should be understood before rejecting it.
3) A benefited, while alive, from the fact that B runs algorithms that reliably result in B grieving for A once A is dead. In this case rejecting grieving for A may have the consequence of also rejecting those algorithms, which would perhaps otherwise have been beneficial to someone in the same way that were in the past beneficial to A. Here again, perhaps those potential costs should be understood before rejecting grief.
Is there a fourth option?
A combination of all three options is true; I don’t know of a fourth. Grief is mostly a waste because there’s more of it than I’d like (option 1), but also helps to prevent future causes of grief (option 3) and possibly helps the griever cope (option 2).
I see grief as analogous to pain. It’s an evolved response. Its primary function is conditioning by negative reinforcement. To avoid grief, people try to prevent grief-causing situations, e.g. protecting their loved ones more. Just as with pain, we have to live with grief today but we may wish to self-modify to grieve less.
Because it’s an evolved mechanism, it tends to be entangled with other processes; thus it is claimed to have a secondary purpose—to help with “healthy psychological coping” of the grieving person in accepting reality. I’ve heard this claim but have not looked into its sources and don’t have a good estimation of how true or important this is.
I suffer from experiencing grief a lot more than I am willing to suffer in order to get these benefits. If it was just a matter of choice, I would choose to grieve a lot less or maybe not at all, in all situations. That would require a level of modification of my psychology that would also enable me to get the above benefits without grieving. In reality I don’t have that level of control.
However, we do have some control over how much we grieve. In particular, grieving for very distant people seems to be off-by-default in most people, and only activated by deliberate thinking about those distant people; i.e. this kind of grief may be avoided a lot of the time. It also happens to be the kind of grief where the above benefits are least (or nonexistent). So of course I focus my efforts and advise others to practice grieving less first of all in such circumstances.
Note: “grief” can be read broadly, as in “feeling sad through empathy with suffering distant others”.
Given this, I am very confused by what you think is special about the esoteric possibilities you discuss with alex_zag_al above.
That is, given my understanding of your position, it seems you should reject or endorse grieving over those doomed intergalactic explorers to basically the same degree that you would either reject or endorse grieving over a boat full of tourists who drown on their way to Greece. (I’m not really sure what degree that is… what I get from your explanation is that you endorse some amount of grief, but not as much of it as people actually demonstrate.)
Does it matter at all that they’re in a spaceship etc. etc. etc.? Or does that just happen to be the example under discussion?
It matters that I’m not going to interact with them again (or with their dead bodies). For people who are still entangled with me, like tourists in Greece, I allow more grief because in principle my grief (and by TDT-like reasoning, the grief of others) may help prevent other drowning accidents in the future. But you’re right that the actual grief I experience in practice for tourists drowning in Greece is for practical purposes zero.
The example of a spaceship is esoteric; I wasn’t the one who chose it, but I responded to people discussing exotic propositions like grieving for “acausal” people like those in other quantum branches. I can’t even afford to grieve for everyone who suffers on this Earth, in my own branch − 150,000 people die daily and I haven’t got that much grief to spend even if I tried to grieve as much as possible (which I don’t want to).